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Friday, July 6, 2012

The Gaquet Princes Blog Tour: guest post, excerpts and giveaway

We host The Gasquet Princes Blog Tour today, presented by Goddess Fish Promotions. Author Sherry Gloag is sharing two excerpts from her sweet romance novels and is holding a giveaway for some cool jewelry pieces and more. Welcome and continue to read about the Gasquet Princes.

“From Now Until Forever”Blurb:For Prince Liam, families meant bad news, unwanted commitments, and the loss of his personal freedom. Love spawned white picket fences, slippers at the hearth with a wife and kids making demands, so why did those images disappear when he met Melanie Babcot?

Melanie Babcot fought hard to escape the horrors of her youth and vowed to remain single and free, so when paid to protect Prince Liam from insurgents why did her personal pledge fly out the window?

EXCERPT “From Now Until Forever”:

Liam Fitzwilliam Gasquet stared in amazement at the blooming patch of red milliseconds before the pain exploded in his arm. Some trigger-happy idiot had fired in his direction. Indignation didn’t have time to take root before another bullet kicked the dust at his feet. Not ‘trigger-happy’.

Intentional.

The rebels had found the fourth and youngest son of Jean-Phillipe Gasquet, ruler of the tiny kingdom adjacent to the Swiss border. When had they discovered his whereabouts?

With a reluctant sigh, he faced the truth of it. They hadn’t ‘found’ him at all. They’d followed him.

“His Chosen Bride”Blurb: Prince Henri Gasquet is happy to let his father, the king, choose his bride for him until he meets Monica Latimer.

Monica Latimer is not prepared to risk letting any man close enough to learn about her Gift. A gift that normally has men running for the hills when they find out about it.

EXCERPT “His Chosen Bride”:

She lost track of time until the flames caught her attention once more. They flickered from orange to gold, to silver, to white.

A flurry of snowflakes masked the flames and for a second Monica watched the most beautiful, pristine snow-scene she’d ever seen. Her lips curved in longing. How she’d love to get a toboggan and slide down that slope. She knew where it was, and had done just that many times in her childhood, first with her parents and then, in clandestine manner, with her brother. Sneaking an old tin tray from the back of her mother’s walk-in pantry, she’d then grabbed Billy’s hand and they’d rushed out the back gate, heading for the lakeside track that led up into the hills.

Darkness, dense and thick with grief dropped over the scene.

Startled and disconcerted by the strength of emotion emanating from the vision Monica shifted to her knees, ready to stand, when a voice, a deep male voice, sharp with fear called out her name.

“Monica!”

She knew she’d never heard the voice before, and yet—it was as familiar to her as the image she saw in her mirror each morning.

“Help me, Monica.”

Desperate for more clues, she searched the darkness within the flames until it sputtered and faded. With a curse she jumped up and ran for the phone. With her outstretched hand hovering over it she halted and let her hand drop to her side once more. What could she say? What would the police or rescue team think of her if she called them and told them she’d seen a vision of a man in distress?

They’d laugh in her face and classify her as a lunatic. Well, maybe not. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d contacted them with positive information but something—an instinctive gut reaction told her what she’d seen this time hadn’t happened yet.

Guest Post:

Usually we read about the girl/woman being a princess/queen but in your two stories the male leads are princes. Can you tell us why you made them princes and which scenes seemed to write themselves or were harder to create?

Thank you for inviting me to explain why I found some scenes easier to write than others in my first two books in the Gasquet Princes series.

The reason both heroes are princes is because after watching the British Royal wedding last year, I wondered whether there’d still be any mileage in creating a ‘Royal’ story.

Given all the ‘hoopla’ was over by this time, I thought the chances of having anything accepted were slim, so began by mentally targeting an online publisher who’d previously accepted several of my short stories.

I do not plot my stories out before I start writing, so creating princes as my heroes was not a conscious decision.

Melanie, my heroine in From Now Until Forever, the first of what is a four book series, ‘showed’ me the opening scene where someone, a man, is being fired at. So, ‘he,’ Liam, became my prince. All I had to do then was discover why ‘she’, Melanie, was at the scene to witness the shooting.

This opening scene went down so fast my fingers were tripping over themselves on the keyboard. As the story unfolded and I reached the ‘escape’ scene, not only did this scene need my full concentration, simply to keep up, but because I was laughing so hard at Melanie’s idea and the vehicle she commissioned for their get-away.

The scene that surprised me most was Liam’s ‘Ah-ha’ moment. Until I read it back after I’d finished writing it, I had little idea of what was going on. That said; this was another scene that ‘wrote’ itself. All I had to do was try and keep up with it.

The hardest scene to write in From Now Until Forever was Melanie’s arrival at the palace and took several attempts and variations before it ‘felt’ right.

In the second book, His Chosen Bride, I didn’t even recognise my heroine, Monica, as belonging to this story when I first met her. She was so different to the feisty heroine, Melanie, in my first book; and having briefly met Prince Henri in Liam’s story, I was amazed when he ‘decided’ Monica was ‘his chosen bride’.

For a while this stumped me while I tried to work out how they were going to get together and more importantly, stay together. Both carry unacknowledged baggage from their childhoods. And both ‘feel’ deeply. So this created another problem, especially as I prefer, and Astraea Press only accept, ‘sweet’ romances.

How could I take two such self-contained people and make them interesting enough to hold my reader’s interest and attention? How could I create passion, that simmered, without evoking the editor’s pen? I found the prospect of creating such a scene daunting, and yet when it ‘arrived’, again I was laughing at Monica’s reaction at the start of their passionate scene. Fortunately, so did my editor!

Although the research for the ‘snow scene took quite a long while, because the timing in this scene had to be totally accurate, once I began writing the scene it became another one that almost wrote itself. Not because it is full of speed, as in car chases, but because it is emotionally intense and left me drained when I’d finished.

The hardest scene to write in His Chosen Bride was the meeting between Monica and Henri, after Henri’s arrival in Scotland, when he discovers it was something Monica said to his brother, Liam, that forced him out of his comfort zone.About the author: Multi-published author, Sherry Gloag is a transplanted Scot now living in the beautiful coastal countryside of Norfolk, England. She considers the surrounding countryside as extension of her own garden, to which she escapes when she needs "thinking time" and solitude to work out the plots for her next novel. While out walking she enjoys talking to her characters, as long as there are no other walkers close by.

Apart from writing, Sherry enjoys gardening, walking, reading and cheerfully admits her books tend to take over most of the shelf and floor space in her workroom-cum-office. She also finds crystal craft work therapeutic.

I think there's still interest in the royals. With the Olympics in London, all eyes will be on William and Kate--to see if she has a "belly bump." And, of course, Harry--who is he seeing, who will he marry? I hope that interest carries over to your book!catherinelee100 at gmail dot com

The two remaining royal brothers are twins, Catherine. My intention was to make those stories as different as the first two, but they have decided otherwise and are not making my writing life any easier by that decision ;-) but I do hope to get them under my belt before the end of the year.Thanks you for your company during the past two weeks and please keep a look out for the announcements of the prizewinners.

The more I follow the tour the more I want to read these books! I find it so interesting that some of the scenes "wrote themselves". Is it harder to write the beginning or end of a book? ~Alisianightsky1102 at gmail dot com

Alisia, His Chosen Bride is available FREE all this month if you head over to Astaea Press's book club on FB and contact their reviewcoradinator(@)att(dot)comThank you for your comapny and support during the vbt. Keep a look out for the annoucements about the prize winners. :-)

Hi Beth, We have been hearing about the amazing extremes in weather some of you are enduring across the pond. Some folk over here, too, are having a bad time weather-wise. There's massive flooding in some parts of the country.Thanks for keeping me company. I appreciate it, and hope to announce the winners later today (UK time)